Starting with Discontents
Ideology is one of the more misunderstood terms we have commonly heard enunciated and/or thrown around in common daily discourse. It’s been that way for as long as I can remember. It has been, and is, described by many as a “straight jacket’ on our thinking, or some set of beliefs that work so that people misunderstand the world, as in, “Well, that’s just his/her ideology talking”, or “s/he is so ideological”. This is a charge that I hear particularly about those of us who use a left wing, socially progressive framework in attempting to make sense of the world.1 We also see the same charge levelled at those who consider themselves conservatives or liberals. The assumption is that the person has been tricked or browbeaten into believing some irrational or harmful notion, by elites or charismatic leaders or by reading some unfortunate literature that was found lying around. Of course, this can be true. It happens.
A Definition
My colleague Mirna Carranza and I have recently (2022: 47) defined Ideology in quite different terms, as: “Any system of ideas that describes and explains the values, experiences and political beliefs of an individual or group. Ideologies are often implicit, unstated and framed by culture. They help make sense of the social world and are used to justify a situation or propose alternatives to it — therefore, it is impossible to not have an ideology.” Thus, we actually cannot live in society without acquiring, or perhaps the better term is developing, some sort of world view, or an ideology. To function with some sort of consistency and be able to think critically we have to have some sort of framework to understand the world and what goes on in it. Sometimes our ideology is unconscious, but we all possess a way we in which we judge what’s true vs untrue, good vs bad, beautiful vs ugly. Sometimes we alter, or change, our ideology outright because we have found new information or we have undergone some crisis in our life. But that doesn’t mean we didn’t have a way of understanding and making judgements about the world, it simply means that we changed the framework we use.
Recognizing Difficulties
Having said that, we need to understand that difficulties can arise in our relationship to our world view framework. Problems can occur when we allow ourselves to become so attached to our ideology that it functions like a dogma; we can kiss our ability for critical, even rational, thinking goodbye. I didn’t mean to suggest, as one person thought, that we should “completely drop our view of things”. The point is, that we shouldn’t turn our ideology into a rigid list of beliefs by which everything must be judged. Therein lies sterility. Rather, it should function as a lens, which can be altered to meet changing, novel, or unexpected situations
A Particularly Important Issue for the Left
As I said before, this tendency is not a particular affliction of the Left, it is present among Liberals also, and has been particularly obvious among the Right; see for example the members of the Conservative Party of Canada who regularly are observed arguing over which of them is a “True Blue Conservative”. Nevertheless, it seems clear to me that we Lefties need to be particularly on the lookout for that slide from analysis into dogma. The analysis of capitalism, imperialism, white supremacy and colonialism, etc. is rational though we might not always agree on the details. We need no “dogmatizing” and purity tests. These invariably scare away those who are sincerely searching for a progressive home and allow the Right and Liberals to focus on our differences rather than the real problems. Equally important, let’s face it, we are the minority so constructing factions that engage in purity wars against each other has serious consequences for the ability to work effectively to make progressive change. We need to fight the good fight for our ideas but when circumstances change and new information emerges, we need to be able to recognize the alterations and adapt our analysis to them. Marx and Engels did this all the time.
Resource
Lee, B. & Carranza, M. (2022). A Glossary of Social Justice Perspectives for contemporary Practitioners. Toronto: CommonAct Press.
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1 As anyone who has known me, or has read any of my articles, books or blogs can attest that I am an unapologetic left wing socialist and I lean heavily, though not exclusively, on a Marxist analysis to examine and analyze social, political and economic issues. That may not be as clear as it sounds of course as Marxism has any number of interpretations, or misinterpretations Marx famously said at one time that, “I am not a Marxist”
A Definition
My colleague Mirna Carranza and I have recently (2022: 47) defined Ideology in quite different terms, as: “Any system of ideas that describes and explains the values, experiences and political beliefs of an individual or group. Ideologies are often implicit, unstated and framed by culture. They help make sense of the social world and are used to justify a situation or propose alternatives to it — therefore, it is impossible to not have an ideology.” Thus, we actually cannot live in society without acquiring, or perhaps the better term is developing, some sort of world view, or an ideology. To function with some sort of consistency and be able to think critically we have to have some sort of framework to understand the world and what goes on in it. Sometimes our ideology is unconscious, but we all possess a way we in which we judge what’s true vs untrue, good vs bad, beautiful vs ugly. Sometimes we alter, or change, our ideology outright because we have found new information or we have undergone some crisis in our life. But that doesn’t mean we didn’t have a way of understanding and making judgements about the world, it simply means that we changed the framework we use.
Recognizing Difficulties
Having said that, we need to understand that difficulties can arise in our relationship to our world view framework. Problems can occur when we allow ourselves to become so attached to our ideology that it functions like a dogma; we can kiss our ability for critical, even rational, thinking goodbye. I didn’t mean to suggest, as one person thought, that we should “completely drop our view of things”. The point is, that we shouldn’t turn our ideology into a rigid list of beliefs by which everything must be judged. Therein lies sterility. Rather, it should function as a lens, which can be altered to meet changing, novel, or unexpected situations
A Particularly Important Issue for the Left
As I said before, this tendency is not a particular affliction of the Left, it is present among Liberals also, and has been particularly obvious among the Right; see for example the members of the Conservative Party of Canada who regularly are observed arguing over which of them is a “True Blue Conservative”. Nevertheless, it seems clear to me that we Lefties need to be particularly on the lookout for that slide from analysis into dogma. The analysis of capitalism, imperialism, white supremacy and colonialism, etc. is rational though we might not always agree on the details. We need no “dogmatizing” and purity tests. These invariably scare away those who are sincerely searching for a progressive home and allow the Right and Liberals to focus on our differences rather than the real problems. Equally important, let’s face it, we are the minority so constructing factions that engage in purity wars against each other has serious consequences for the ability to work effectively to make progressive change. We need to fight the good fight for our ideas but when circumstances change and new information emerges, we need to be able to recognize the alterations and adapt our analysis to them. Marx and Engels did this all the time.
Resource
Lee, B. & Carranza, M. (2022). A Glossary of Social Justice Perspectives for contemporary Practitioners. Toronto: CommonAct Press.
________________________________________________________________
1 As anyone who has known me, or has read any of my articles, books or blogs can attest that I am an unapologetic left wing socialist and I lean heavily, though not exclusively, on a Marxist analysis to examine and analyze social, political and economic issues. That may not be as clear as it sounds of course as Marxism has any number of interpretations, or misinterpretations Marx famously said at one time that, “I am not a Marxist”
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